First Impressions

What a fantastic day! For the first time in a long time I had an honest-to-goodness do-nothing day. It was amazing….knitting, Pilates, cooking, vegging…only what I felt like doing…..which includes bringing you all up to date now that we have the internet set up!

I can’t believe we haven’t even been here a week yet—the first few days are an absolute blur! Arriving in Shanghai late Wednesday night, instead of the van that was supposed to pick us up, we were greeted by a Buick Sedan that groaned as we crammed all 10 bags in.  We got to the hotel around 1am and absolutely died. We noticed a letter in the room telling us “general tidying up” construction work would be occurring from 8am-noon. Turns out this translates as “even though you haven’t showered since Tuesday, the water will be off indefinitely, so be thankful we left water bottles in the room for you to wash your face and brush your teeth.” Fun. Luckily the water was on by Thursday night, so we started to feel human again.

Turns out, right next to the hotel is a German brewery--the Hofbrauhaus from Munich! There’s a large contingent of German expats in town I’m told, as there’s a German electronics company here. We haven’t sampled the beer yet, but they do sell decent bread (most Chinese bread is very sweet) and it really amuses me that we go half way around the world, and of all the familiar things, it’s a beer hall from Germany.

Brian’s boss’s girlfriend escorted us all around town on Thursday—we had to buy dishes, sheets, towels, pots/pans, cleaning supplies (heavy emphasis on the cleaning supplies) because it turns out our furnished apartment wasn’t exactly furnished.  Or clean. At the end of day 1, the bottoms of our socks were black. And the master bathroom was the mother of all mold colonies. Cue the meltdown I thought I’d escaped….over a moldy shower. But Friday and Saturday we cleaned and cleaned and we were both feeling much better about the situation. We were completely exhausted and so in a moment of weakness we walked a few doors down and had KFC for dinner (my first time ever!)….both nights.You can get it delivered, by the way.

Sunday’s adventure was the grocery store---I would love to take pictures of the meat department, but I feel strange doing so, since it isn’t exactly a tourist attraction…although it could be! All the bizarre meats you could ever imagine are just raw, unpackaged, unrefrigerated for shoppers to rummage thru with their bare hands! It’s going to take some getting used to…. So far I've stuck to recognizable fish and chicken. I'd thought I saw mussles and was excited about that--turned out to be live turtles.

Okay, well I've been trying to upload photos for almost an hour....we're on a vpn because this blog site is blocked, but the vpn doesn't want me to show you any pictures....a project for tomorrow I guess... Until then!